Getting Good….at Unity

In the gaming world there are people that do well, and people that don’t do as well. Assholes of the internet and gaming will tell the less good people that they need to “Get Good.” Gamers however aren’t the only ones who need to get good, game developers need to get good as well. We are given hundreds of tools and we need to be able to pick some and get really good at using them so that we can make amazing games.

My current tool of choice is Unity. I’ve been working on a project that’s close to being announced for a few months, and it’s forced me to really dive into what Unity has to offer. I’ll talk now about two features I really love in Unity.

UI:

The UI features in Unity are pretty amazing. First off is the wide variety that exists. You can place images, buttons, text, and even input fields. The best thing about this is that inside the canvas that all of the UI exists in, you’re able to set up specific things to make the UI set specifically. For example, you can set the UI to be always shown from the perspective of the camera. So say if you have a camera that moves around, the UI will still appear to stay in the same place! It also has fantastic ways to setup to be scalable, so for someone like me working on a mobile title there is nothing better because of the wide range of phones and other mobile devices.

Plugins:

Plugins have turned out to play a huge roll in my current project. The plugin in particular is the Google Play Games Unity Plugin. This plugin provides an easy way to use the Google Play Games services inside of Unity. As mentioned before, my current project is a mobile game, and so being able to connect with Google Play Games to create a seamless multiplayer experience is amazing. This is a service I have played around with before with Android programming in general, and I’m super excited that it is usable with Unity, all thanks to a simple plugin.

In short, Unity is a great tool, and it’s something that a lot of new game developers jump in to learn how to make games. However, it’s also something that old developers will jump in as well, because of the host of options Unity gives you!